Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism: The Central Argument By Howard J. Fisher
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Maxwell s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism brought about what Einstein called the greatest change in the axiomatic basis of physics since Newton But Maxwell s aim was never to construct an axiomatic theory Instead the Treatise presents an argument which beginning with the most characteristic electrical and magnetic phenomena and interpreting them as manifestations of continuous fields of electric and magnetic energy culminates in Maxwell s theory of light as a wave motion within those fields. Book maxwell's treatise on electricity and magnetism and magnetism The argument of the Treatise is not straightforwardly demon strative but is a dialectical one that can be challenging to discern among the many topics presented This book undertakes to extract and expound the principal path of Maxwell s dialectical thinking Maxwell s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism The Central ArgumentMost good books lend themselves to be read on many levels One can read them superficially merely for momentary pleasure or study them deeply working your way slowly through their contents For the most part I try to chart a middle path through these two extremes doing my best to understand what I m reading at least on a basic level without getting bogged down in academic study However some books simply do not lend themselves to that approach and this is one of them One can skim over the mathematical proofs in say Newton s Principia and still get a fairly good idea of what the book is about But in Maxwell s magnum opus the math is what does the talking Indeed by the midway point I was so desperate feeling guilty lazy and stupid for understanding so little of what I was reading that I decided to turn to an old ally Kahn Academy There I went through all of the videos on electricity and magnetism and learned a great deal The last time I had any formal instruction on the subject was in my sopho year of high school and I doubt I understand much back then But I found when I picked up the book again that even this Hail Mary would not save me from the perdition of Maxwell s writing Indeed as I had already bought the heavily annotated student s edition with copious notes by Howard J Fisher it seemed that I had used up all of my lifelines and simply had to content myself with only the most superficial reading of this important book What follows then is probably as valuable as a review of Hamlet by somebody with an elementary level of English Here I goes Now as I mentioned the version I picked up is meant for students Thus it is heavily abridged and often so full of explanatory footnotes that the original text is crowded out For what it s worth even if you do have the mathematical and scientific chops to handle Maxwell s tome I would recommend either this version or something similar The original is famous for being rather unfocused and overlong After all this book was not meant to be Maxwell s Origin of Species a text devoted to propounding a radical new theory Maxwell had already set forth his most revolutionary insights most notably in the paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865 several years before this book was published Instead this was meant as a kind of definitive textbook on the subject to be studied by university students telegram technicians and other specialists Thus there are long sections in which he rehashes old theories which would be of limited interest to any modern reader This edition attempts to pare down the original leaving only what Fisher considers to be the central argument that is the material leading directly to Maxwell s signature breakthroughs These would be first his four famous eponymous equations and second the electromagnetic theory of light Regarding the former as you may know Maxwell did not actually formulate his equations in the form which modern students encounter them It was one of Maxwell s followers Oliver Heaviside who put the equations into their definitive form Instead Maxwell puts forward twelve equations which use the now defunct quaternion notation rather than vector calculus This makes Maxwell s presentation seem rather foreign even to those less ignorant than myself What is Maxwell has a liking for using Gothic letters as symbols in his equations which gives them a doubly strange appearance More generally I think even a mathematically literate reader will have some trouble following significant portions of this book if only because Maxwell s mathematical language seems clunky and dated In my version for example Fisher is continually translating Maxwell s operations into familiar forms which admittedly I still did not follow As I had recently made my way through an abridged version of Faraday s epochal Experimental Researches in Electricity I was most interested in the sections in which Maxwell reflects on his predecessor s work He is extremely laudatory of the English physicist and is quite generous in giving credit for developing this new way of examining electricity And indeed if I have any way of understanding Maxwell it is only through the lens of Faraday At first glance the devoted experimentalist with no mathematical schooling seems to have little in common with the visionary theorist who prefers numbers to words And yet as I m sure Maxwell would agree they were bound together by a new vision of the cosmos In a nutshell and said very imprecisely I think their insight was to see energy rather than matter as fundamental In the Newtonian view that preceded Maxwell the world was composed of matter indeed even light was supposed to be made up of little corpuscles This matter traveled in straight lines and attracted other matter in straight lines This Newtonian view was embodied in say Amp re s earlier theory of electromagnetism. Book maxwell's treatise on electricity and magnetism pdf free download And yet this view always sat uncomfortably with Faraday who instead saw the curving lines of the magnetic field as the fundamental reality rather than one piece of matter attracting another via action at a distance Indeed Faraday s brilliant experiment involving the shifting of light via a magnet got him tantalizingly close to the central insight of Maxwell s life the unification of light with electromagnetic radiation Faraday is one fount of Maxwell s inspiration Yet if Maxwell has a mathematical predecessor it is Joseph Louis Lagrange whose work comprises a culminating chapter in this book Lagrange arguably developed the math that Faraday had been striving toward from another direction For in Lagrangian mechanics rather than thinking of forces being exerted by physical objects one thinks of the energies in the system the object in question merely following the path of least resistance through the fields of energy around it It was Maxwell s great insight to see how the work of Faraday and Lagrange among many many other brilliant scientists fit together to form one complete account of electricity and magnetism It is a theory in which fields of energy take precedence over particles indeed in which the world around us is filled with vibrations in luminiferous ether And while some parts of Maxwell s theory notably the ether have not survived to the present day his basic insight was so sound and so significant that as Richard Feynman said his discovery constitutes one of the major turning points in human history You certainly wouldn t be reading this review without it Thus Maxwell s name stands beside Newton s and Einstein s as one of the greatest physicists of all time even if his book is completely opaque to people like me English
| Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism: The Central Argument By Howard J. Fisher |
| 1888009454 |
| 9781888009453 |
| English |
| 526 |
| Paperback |
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